Dirk Krausse, Manuel Fernández-Götz, Leif Hansen and Inga Kretschmer. The Heuneburg and the Early Iron Age Princely Seats: First Towns North of the Alps (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2016, 206pp., 169 b/w and colour illustr., pbk, ISBN: 978-963-9911- 81-9) The Heuneburg near the town of Sigmaringen at the edge of the Swabian Alb in Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany is one of the most impressive and, indeed, the most intensively studied Early Iron Age sites north of the Alps. It was for a long time thought to be restricted to a defended hilltop settlement on a small, almost liver-shaped plateau rising above the upper Danube river. The first systematic excavations starting in 1950 revealed hitherto unexpected findings for a Central European Iron Age settlement with an unprecedented mud-brick fortifica- tion in two of its multiple occupation phases (phase IVa-b). The Heuneburg quickly became a byword within the arch- aeological community. For generations of future archaeologists from Europe and even the USA, participating in the summer camps excavating at the hillfort was a memorable experience during their studies. Currently, research on the Heuneburg and its surroundings is part of a long-term research project financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and led by Dirk Krausse, head of the Department for Archaeological Heritage Preservation (Archäologische Denkmalpflege) in Baden-Württemberg. Although the book is not very large (206 pages, including 169 mostly coloured illustrations with several high-end digital reconstructions and visualisations of the excavation results) it is an excellent com- pilation of decades of research which has so far been published almost entirely in German. The volume offers a short synop- sis of the previous and recent research, as well as an overview of the results of ongoing excavations on the Heuneburg, its immediate surroundings, and other sites within its micro-region. This alone would make it an indispensable companion for every Iron Age archaeologist. The authors, Dirk Krausse, Manuel Fernández-Götz, Leif Hansen, and Inga Kretschmer, as well as thirteen additional contributors, take on the task of finally writing a com- prehensive, but at the same time very concise and highly informative report of the research in and around the Heuneburg, which they refer to as the first town north of the Alps, and its signifi- cance within a broader context of elite set- tlements and urbanisation processes in Early Iron Age Europe north of the Alps. The decade-long, intensive excavations and subsequent research on this multiper- iod site produced an enormous amount of information about settlement structures, architectural features, finds, and the social organisation of complex Iron Age societies. The most important of the previously pub- lished, German-language reports are the eleven volumes of the monograph series Heuneburgstudien (Heuneburg Studies) that deal with the excavations carried out between 1950 and 1979, the first phase of systematic excavations on the hilltop. More recently, the monograph series Forschungen und Berichte zur Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche in Baden-Württemberg (Research and Reports on the Pre- and Protohistory in Baden-Württemberg), report the excava- tions of the last two decades on the plateau but also in the surrounding areas. Modern prospection methods, such as large-scale geomagnetic surveys in the 1990s, revealed the full extent of an open outer settlement of impressive dimensions which has subse- quently been partially excavated. Book Reviews 281 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2021.12 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Durham University Library, on 03 May 2021 at 11:36:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at